A thick skin is key to baseball, sausage racing

The Italian was sent tumbling to the turf by bat-wielding Pittsburgh Pirate Randall Simon, who happens to be African-American.

But please, let's not make this a racial thing, as the media tried to do with some unrelated skin-related remarks made at Wrigley Field the other day.

This is baseball and sausages we're talking about. European style sausages have performed heroically in major-league ballparks for a hundred years, even on steamy hot days in July.

And who among you would judge a ballpark sausage by the color of its skin?

Simon used his bat on Wednesday to swat the Italian sausage as the mascot ran around the field in one of those goofy between-innings baseball races between a bratwurst mascot, a Polish sausage mascot and a hot dog mascot.

The Italian sausage fell, causing a sausage pile-up.

On Thursday, Simon was fined $432 for disorderly conduct, which is the average tip ballplayers give to strippers on the road. Happily, he wasn't charged with a hate crime.

"That wasn't my intention," Simon was quoted as saying. "I was just trying to get a tap at the costume. I'm a fun player, and I've never hurt anyone in my life."

We all believe him. Yet, what's truly important is this: Though the Italian sausage fell, it did not lose mass quantities of red sauce. No giardiniera was spilled on the infield.

Clearly, all the sausages could take the heat. That's extremely significant. It could be their thick European skins that saved them.

Milwaukee, which was settled by Germanic beer-drinking peoples, doesn't have spicy chorizo sausage mascots, or spicy Jamaican jerk chicken sausage mascots, or sausages from south of the Mason-Dixon line, or spicy hot sausages from Latin America.

As a former butcher, I can tell you why European sausages survive the summer ballpark heat. It's their skin casings.

Natural casings are white, almost milky in color. Casings aren't dark, though there's nothing wrong in wishing they were, and I hope no one will play the race card and condemn me for applauding tough yet light skin casings.

And though my critics keep reminding me I was a butcher before I started writing for money, no one can say I've ever been unkind to any sausage, whether veal, pork or beef.

To investigate further, we called the Milwaukee Brewers and got spokesman Jon Greenberg on the phone.

I wanted to know if the Wrigley Field Skin Theory--that skin color determines the ability to best withstand summer heat--also applies to ballpark sausages and mascots in Milwaukee.

Theoretically, could dark-skinned sausages take the heat in Milwaukee as well as their lighter-skinned brother sausages?

"Ahhh, I'm not going to get into that," Greenberg said after a brief yet intensely painful pause.

"It's a fun race that has no, there's no correlation. Different people do it every day."

He means that though the sausage mascots remain European on the outside, the people inside the suits are multicultural.

So I interviewed someone who'd know. He put on a sausage costume and ran the sausage race in Milwaukee this season.

He ran in the costume of the bratwurst, even though he's Irish.

"I think the Italian had it coming," said the Irish bratwurst, who shall remain unnamed.

My source recalls that on his race day, two guys from the grounds crew were the Italian and the Polish. He was the brat, and he started teasing the Italian for wearing a little chef's hat.

"The brat looks ridiculous too, but they took it serious, the Italian and the Polish, they got angry, and then they just started sprinting," he said.

"But I said screw it, I wouldn't run, and so I walked over to the dugout, and made fun of [Cubs manager] Dusty Baker. Then I went into the stands and high-fived people.

"It's hot in those suits. But I regret making a mockery of it. Because, when you're a sausage in major-league baseball, it's serious business."

Clearly, it's not the color of the sausage that's important. It's the quality of the skin that counts, including skin thickness.

That helps a sausage stand up to a hot ballpark grill and also protects sarcastic Irish brats from the angry Polish and Italians who won't be mocked.